Unity Technologies announced on Friday that Unity 2017.1 is now available to download from the Unity Store. Unity 2017.1 is the start of a new cycle that evolves the world’s most popular game engine into an ever-expanding creation engine for gaming and real-time entertainment. Unity 2017.1, which is the company’s first fully subscription-based product, focuses on helping teams work together more collaboratively by equipping artists and designers with two powerful new visual tools: Timeline and Cinemachine.

Unity exists to democratise development, solve hard problems and enable success — three core values that are the driving forces of Unity’s adoption by millions of creators. Unity powers more than 50 per cent of all new mobile games and nearly 75 per cent of all AR and VR content. Interactive content made with Unity reaches nearly 3 billion devices worldwide.

“Unity 2017.1 is a one-stop creation powerhouse that will allow teams of artists and designers to unlock their full creativity. With incredibly open choreography tools like Timeline, smart procedural cameras in Cinemachine which follow your direction, and a built-in world-class colour grading suite plus the ability to edit and output all from within, we’re unleashing a content creation game changer that will improve collaboration across the board.” said Unity head of cinematics Adam Myhill “Working in an environment with so much power and flexibility doesn’t just save a huge amount of time, it allows you to experiment, iterate and collaborate in ways which are the key ingredients of so many great things.”

Unity 2017.1 contains more than 100 new features and improvements devoted to increasing collaboration, improving runtime performance and graphics quality, and more. Key highlights include:

Timeline and Cinemachine: New world-class artist tools Timeline and Cinemachine empower artists to create cinematic content and gameplay sequences without the need for coding. Timeline allows artists to easily blend and tweak animations within Unity, allowing for freedom to experiment and refine their creations. Cinemachine optimises the artist workflow and gives room for experimentation by eliminating hours of hand animation, camera programming, and revision by using smart cameras for shot composition in cinematic sequences and gameplay. Engineers can also easily integrate sequences created with Timeline through the powerful scripting API and extend Timeline with the Playable API to create custom track types. Everyone will benefit from these new creative tools as it gives them access to artist tools that are intuitive, powerful and easy to use.

Data-driven Live-Ops that tailors content to your audience: Unity 2017.1 gives users the power to take action on insights using a suite of Live-Ops analytics tools. Remote Settings is a powerful new feature that gives users the ability to make changes to their games in real-time, all without deploying a new version. Underpinning this is Standard Events which give teams a window into how players are using their creations so they can make adjustments that will optimize enjoyment. Teams can also further maximize their success with Unity 2017.1’s built-in revenue generation solutions, bringing more opportunities to creators to optimize the performance of their content.

A robust ecosystem that accelerates time-to-market: Unity’s robust and ever-growing ecosystem accelerates time-to-market and decreases production costs through the Unity Asset Store, a massive catalog of free and paid off-the-shelf content created by the community, for the community. The Asset Store’s all-new redesign is rolling out this summer and is home to art, models, scripts, sound effects, editor extensions, productivity tools, and more — anything an individual creator or team might need to make development easier and get their project to the finish line faster. Custom work and additional collaborators can be sourced through Unity Connect, the professional network and talent marketplace for all Unity Creators.

Unity 2017.1 subscription plans are available with enhanced features and services to support customers’ individual needs: Unity Pro represents the top of the line in professional-grade tools while Unity Plus offers serious creators who intend to publish additional tools and services to help them be successful. Custom-tailored enterprise solutions are also available for teams of 21 or more. For hobbyists and aspiring creators, Unity Personal provides all the core features they need to get started for free.